Secret Language by Monica Wood Read Free Book Online Page A

only been able to warm herself, if she had only stayed inside her body as she pledged forever and true, she might have learned to live with a man like Joe, a man who loved her.

FOUR
    When Faith and Connie come to clean out the trailer, they are accompanied by a flock of Fullers darting in and out like birds: Joe; his brothers, Will and Brian and Greg; the sisters-in-law, Sarah and Maggie and Amy; most of the nephews and the lone niece; Joe Senior; and Phoebe, in a strictly supervisory role. In all, nineteen people, two cars, four trucks. Far too many people, more than the trailer has ever seen. They cheerfully step out of each other’s way as they carry out the sofa, the kitchen table, the box of knickknacks, the lawn ducks, the TV, the beds. They talk a lot, a vigorous chittering all around Faith’s head.
    Without a word, Faith and Connie assign themselves to Delle’s room, which is suddenly Billy’s room too when they discover his clothes in the closet, bunched at the end of the rod. Faith grabs them in musky hunks and rolls them into the pile of Delle’s clothes. She drops the heap into a carton the size of a trash can which Phoebe has marked SALVATION ARMY—DO NOT LOAD . The room, long closed, smells of must, illness, secrets. Faith takes Delle’s things from the top of the dresser—a decorative marble box that was given to her by Helen Hayes; the framed glossy from
Silver Moon
; a pillbox of polished stone; a doily made by Grammy Spaulding—and places them on top of the mound of junk in Billy and Delle’s traveling trunk, a great gilded thing with a rounded top that looks like something from a pirate ship. Then Will and his oldest boy heft the emptied dresser, moving slow as bears in the narrow hall.
    “Do you mind if I take the doily?” Connie says.
    Faith looks at the doily, a delicate, lacy square, mottled withwhite shapes where Delle’s things lay untouched for years. “Go ahead.” Connie plucks the doily from the trunk, folds it daintily, and tucks it into the back pocket of her jeans.
    Faith pushes the lid of the trunk and it groans shut with the finality of a closed coffin. Faith and Connie grab it by the handles, but it is far too heavy for them, so they drag it across the floor and all the way down the hall to the front door. As Faith backs out into the dazzling sunlight, a blur of faces and hands appears at her side, waiting to help. In the midst of this breathtaking abundance she is seized with a timorous gratitude—not for her new family, but for the sight of her sister at the other end of the trunk, for the knowledge that she will not have to bear alone the burden of ordinary love she has married into.
    She offers the last look and wanders through the small, stripped rooms. Her footsteps echo behind her, and then she hears another set of feet.
    “It looks like no one ever lived here,” Connie says. Faith nods, taking in the naked windows, the swept corners. She watches Connie run her hand over the bare kitchen counter. “It looks like
we
never lived here,” Connie says.
    Faith doesn’t answer. She looks around, for some sign of herself, her sister. On the back wall where the sofa used to be is a cruel scar that still shows through the white, white paint, where Delle once tried to gouge her name with a fork.
    “Let’s just go,” Faith says. But Connie stays put. Her eyes move over the cramped rooms inch by inch, as if she’s imagining what used to be there. Then she turns her back and marches outside, into the flurry of Joe’s family.
    Faith checks the rooms one last time. Finding nothing left, she shuts the trailer’s tinny door on what she hopes is her old life.
    If Joe minds being a threesome he doesn’t say. The arrangement suits Faith even better than she expected. When she arrives for Sunday dinner on Joe’s arm, the house swallows her instantly into the stampede of Joe’s family and the rituals of food, family stories, and tedious, off-key sing-alongs around the piano. But